Earl Fontainelle is a researcher of religion and Philosophy, and the host of The Secret History of Western Esotericism.
Fontainelle, Earl. "A Secret History of Secret History, Part I." The Secret History of Western Esotericism #1 (September 5, 2017) ["In this episode we borrow the following description of western esotericism from the website of the Centre for the History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents and use it as a guide for the first half of a survey of western esoteric traditions:
The term “Western esotericism” covers a wide spectrum of neglected currents in Western cultural history. As an umbrella term that intends to highlight connections and developments over a long period, from antiquity to the present day, esotericism includes phenomena as varied as Gnosticism, Hermetism, and Neoplatonic Theurgy, Astrology, Alchemy, and Natural Magic …
We attempt to give a very basic introduction to each of these currents of thought and to the texts that tell us about them. If you’ve always heard that ‘Neoplatonism’, ‘Hermeticism’, and ‘Gnosticism’ were somehow important precursors to the more familiar esoteric currents which we know and love from the Renaissance and early-modern periods, but don’t really know much about these movements in their natural habitat, this episode is the perfect introduction. We also introduce three of the most important occult sciences, Astrology, Alchemy, and Magic, and foreshadow the complexity and intricacy of the textual traditions which transmit them, which will take this podcast from the muddy banks of the Euphrates and the Nile circa 1,500 BCE to the drawing-rooms of Enlightenment Europe and beyond."]
---. "A Secret History of Secret History, Part II." The Secret History of Western Esotericism #2 (September 5, 2017) ["In this episode, part two of our overambitious survey of western esotericism, we look at the second half of the summary borrowed from the Centre for the History of Hermetic Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, which mentions:
… Christian Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, Christian Theosophy and Illuminism, the currents of modern Occultism, Spiritualism, Traditionalism, the New Age movement, Neopaganism, Ritual Magical groups, and a host of contemporary alternative spiritualities and forms of popular “occulture”.
Our list has jumped from the occult sciences discussed last episode right into the Renaissance; where are the middle ages? All too often, this period is devalued in historiography. We therefore spend some time surveying the amazing flowering of esoteric sciences, Hermetic lore, the kabbala, and ‘mystical’ ideas in the middle ages, and emphasise the importance of the medieval Islamicate world in the history of western thought generally, and western esotericism specifically. We do get to the Renaissance (finally), and discuss a few key players. We then dart through the Reformation period, sketching the context of European death, destruction, and ideological warfare which provides a context for so much of the flowering of esoteric thought in this period. Finally, we make the briefest of nods to the modern period, the new types of esoteric thinking that have arisen in the period of ‘disenchantment’ following the Enlightenment, and their continued development today."]
---. "Esoteric Orientalism Part I: Ancient Barbarian Sages." The Secret History of Western Orientalism #8 (October 11, 2017) ["When we talk about the origins of western thought, we are nearly always talking about the classical Greeks. But the Greeks themselves had a curious habit of attributing their own wisdom in the sciences, in philosophy, and in other arts such as magic and astrology, to their neighbors in the Near East. This episode is the first in a series of two podcasts examining the troubled relationship that the Greeks had with what they perceived as their more ancient contemporaries. Concentrating on Mesopotamia and Egypt, we also look at the Indian Brahmans and the Jews, all through the Greek lens which informs the later western esoteric traditions. Along the way, we discussThe influential theory of ‘orientalism’ propounded by Edward Said, considering some of its drawbacks and advantages, Greek chauvinism, which considered all non-Greeks to be ‘barbarians’, alongside the troubled admiration which the Greeks had for other cultures, The process by which esoteric traditions often bolster their claims by constructing an ‘authenticating apparatus’ of ancient wisdom, The ancient sages Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, and Moses through Greek esoteric eyes, and The concept of ‘Platonic Orientalism’ which has been coined to describe this phenomenon of appropriating ‘barbarian wisdom’ among the Platonists of late antiquity and beyond."]
---. "Esoteric Orientalism Part II: The Greeks are Always Children?" The Secret History of Western Esotericism #9 (October 18, 2017) ["We looked in the last episode at the phenomenon of orientalism among the ancient Greeks, and at the particular brand of orientalism known as ‘Platonic’, an approach to non-Greek civilizations which sees them as ancient sources of wisdom personified by wise men like Zoroaster, Hermes, and others. In our second excursion into the ancient Greeks’ reception of their ancient neighbors, we look at the common Greek claim that they learned their sciences from the wise barbarians. Were they right to say this? We don’t manage to get very far toward answering this question in a general way, but we do settle a few points, including the fact that we must look to Mesopotamia for the origins of scientific astronomy, and that the Greeks were standing on the shoulders of Babylonian giants when they made their own striking advances in astronomy in the Hellenistic period. Having concluded this much, we can’t resist a quick look at the controversy surrounding Martin Bernal’s work Black Athena, which is still raging (if staid academic debates can be said to ‘rage’) thirty years on from the publication of its first volume. Bernal’s work takes an interesting angle on the ‘Greeks are always children’ theme, claiming that ancient Egyptian culture was hugely influential on the development of Greek culture. We don’t agree or disagree with this claim (yet), but we do agree with Bernal’s important observation that the classical history of the nineteenth century wrote the near east out of the Greek story for reasons that have more to do with ideas of ‘Aryan European’ identity than with historical evidence."]
---. "The Long Secret History of Judaism, Part 1." The Secret History of Western Esotericism #11 (November 2, 2017) ["However we want to define ‘the west’, the Jews are there right from the beginning, a persistent ‘foreign’ presence and simultaneously a defining feature of western intellectual life. This episode introduces the Jews and Judaism, two different, but linked, historical realities. We look a bit at the Jews, the near eastern Semitic people whose strange history led to their occupying a paradoxical place as foreigners at the heart of the western world. We also discuss Judaism, the religion of the Jews, and the amazing transformations it has undergone over millennia, from a henotheistic cult with typically near-eastern characteristics to a radically monotheistic faith of the cosmopolitan Græco-Roman world. We introduce three crucial contributions which Judaism made to the development of western esotericism:the themes of exile and redemption so central to post-exilic Jewish thought
the esoteric hermeneutic techniques with which Rabbinic thinkers began to interrogate their textual canon, a kind of reading which had a profound influence on the subsequent history of esoteric interpretation in the west, and the esoteric texts of Hekhalot and Merkavah ‘mysticism’, fascinating Judaic writings which give us a window on early Jewish interiority and the experiential side of Jewish religious life, and which lie at the roots of the later movement known as kabbalah."]
---. "Methodologies for the study of Magic." The Secret History of Western Esotericism #5 (September 20, 2017) [MB - OK, quick, what comes to your mind when you hear the word magic? I'm really grooving on this podcast. I like the way Earl Fontainelle looks at these subjects from multiple angles. Here in order to start off an exploration of understandings/histories of magic, he breaks down the etymology, histories, and disinformation surrounding the word/concept. Highly recommended for those that practice magic, those that think magic is silly/dangerous, those that have deep religious beliefs (especially of a Manichean nature), those that are rigidly atheist (I would say fundamentalist), and definitely those that are wrapped up in fanatical ideologies (the type where whole groups of beings/cultures are the enemy and need to be wiped out). What is good or bad - how do we decide? what are the consequences of those decisions? The overall series is a treasure for artists/creatives/seekers (and Humanities professors like me :) What comes to your mind when you think of magic - what happens when we actual explore a concept and think about the multiple ways it is framed?]
---. "Prayer to the Gods of Night: The Near-Eastern Roots of Astrology." The Secret History of Western Esotericism #10 (October 25, 2017) ["The idea that the heavenly bodies follow recurring patterns seems obvious, but it only became obvious when someone discovered it. In fact, the Greeks seem not even to have known that the planets ‘wandered’ until the fifth century BCE. It was the Mesopotamian civilisation of the Babylonians who were really going hard with this stuff. From about 1,000 BCE (speaking very roughly) we see both a well-developed omen-literature, attributing earthly effects to numerous astronomical phenomena, and the beginnings of mathematical models whereby the movements of the various astral ‘gods’ could be predicted. This developed into both the first mathematical astronomy (as we saw last episode) and the beginnings of the first astrology (as we see this episode)."]
---. "So What is Western Esotericism, Anyway?" The Secret History of Western Esotericism (September 5, 2017) ["This episode introduces the SHWEP project, designed to be a tool for anyone wishing to explore the often misunderstood or overlooked byways of western culture; the aim is to be accessible to anyone with an interest in the history of ideas, while maintaining a standard of evidence-based, reliable, and balanced scholarship which will make the podcast useful to high-level academic specialists as well. The SHWEP is a long-form historical investigation, starting from as far back in history as we can go and attempting to trace the genealogies of important streams of esotericism all the way from the beginning to the present day. By engaging in dialogue with leading experts and specialists in every branch of the amazing field of western esoteric studies, SHWEP aims to provide the most complete, detailed, and up-to-date resource for studying these currents available anywhere outside of formal academe."]
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